The Knives

by Richard T. Kelly

  ‘To me, a politician must say when things are not tolerable.’

  ‘Words bother me less than deeds, Councillor. Now I’ve got a very early start tomorrow, will you forgive me?’

  5

  Blaylock was on the roads by 11 a.m. and did the hour’s journey to the North York Moors in gauzy November sunlight that broke through the clouds and gave the bracken slopes a burnished glow as the Jaguar ripped along country lanes. From his backseat Blaylock silently admired the broad grassy moorland, the dry-stone walls and grazing sheep and secluded whitewashed pubs, behind whose wooden doors he felt a wistful urge to vanish for the afternoon.

  Martin had for some time been scowling at the sat-nav when their joining party came abruptly into view on the horizon, congregated by a parked minibus on a gravelly hard shoulder ahead – four young men ready for action in neoprene and over-suits, helmets on, harnesses with belay plates and Prusik loops dangling.

  Climbing from the Jaguar Blaylock was uncommonly aware of his police team parking up behind, though he could read little reaction to them from the expressions of Sadaqat’s group. Sensing he needed to pitch in big he exchanged hardy greetings and handshakes with them, though there were not the jokey spirits he had expected, more of a subdued pre-match feel in the air, not so far from Blaylock’s own mood. Sadaqat’s quiet authority was clear, his gaze intent under the dark line of his brow. Javed continued to exude the vague discontent of the perennial wingman. Muhammad, ‘Mo’, he of the tonsured lightning flash, seemed tightly wound, nodding his head to some internal beat. Bespectacled Nasser was the only one who smiled, albeit in a sickly manner that spoke of nerves.

  Sadaqat beckoned Blaylock to the minibus bonnet, spread out a map and pinned it against the breeze with his elbows. Blaylock was aware of Andy sidling across to peer over his shoulder.

  ‘Looks like we’ve plenty to see down there?’

  ‘All the trouble you’ve gone to, I didn’t think you’d want to just climb inside a hatch and poke round some grotty passageways. It’s a long-ish cave but no big surprises. We abseil in, okay by you?’

  Blaylock nodded, imagining Andy’s expression at his back.

  ‘We go along some vadose canyons. The water disperses a few different ways but we’ll keep clear, mainly we’re just hacking along phreatic passages that used to be streamways, and finally we get back to the light through a sump. Not too hairy but we’re gonna get wet, yeah?’

  ‘Got it,’ replied Blaylock, more or less nonplussed.

  There was gear awaiting him in the back of the minibus and he climbed in, stripped off and suited up with some awkwardness, relieved that no smartphone-wielding Instagrammer was around to snap him in his jockey shorts. Moments later it struck him with a vexing pang that this whole outing was a notable photo opportunity to which no one, it seemed, had thought to invite an official photographer.

  A shuddering bang on the door of the van made him start. It was Sadaqat. ‘We ready?’

  They clambered over a stone wall and picked their way along a beaten track in silence, Sadaqat very much the point-man, Blaylock glad to feel the exertion and the good air and the grass under his boots, his mood only partially clouded by imaginings of the challenge ahead. Not far into a nondescript field Sadaqat stopped by a small manhole cover, and he and Javed stooped and heaved it aside. As Blaylock stood somewhat apart watching Javed unravel an abseil rope and Sadaqat fasten himself up in readiness, Andy moved to his shoulder.

  ‘Boss, you sure you don’t want me to say you’ve been urgently summoned to Downing Street?’

  Blaylock feigned a chuckle and moved toward the manhole where Sadaqat was evincing a notable zeal to push off.

  ‘Don’t you want your helmet light on?’

  ‘Nah, my friend. I like to just – plunge into the void, yeah?’

  Then, with a good seize of the rope, he was backing away down into the blackness. Blaylock waited, clocking the blank expressions on the faces of his comrades for the day as Sadaqat vanished.

  ‘Rope free!’ The cry echoed up from the depths.

  ‘You, sir?’ Nasser indicated to Blaylock, somewhat bashful.

  Blaylock clicked on his own helmet light, clipped and fastened himself and, with a little local difficulty, heaved himself to the brink of the drop. He gripped the rope and, gingerly, put his weight to it, intensely conscious of the eyes upon him. Then he leaned back with his legs apart and sought the happiest distribution of his bulk, taking the judder and scrape of the shaft’s surface under his boots. Howay!, he goaded himself, and began to let the rope release through his hands.

  He took the descent gently, peering about the gloom as the faces and the rope above him receded from view. Soon he could make out the shape of Sadaqat below, then he felt his soles settle on a balcony of rock, and he set to unclamping himself.

  ‘Okay?’ Sadaqat’s voice seemed eerily disembodied.

  ‘No bother,’ Blaylock replied, breathless. ‘Rope free!’

  Now Blaylock knocked off his own lamplight and watched the others come down one by one, their torch beams swivelling wildly round the shaft. Mo, rather as Blaylock had expected, flew downward with one or two cavalier thrusts of his boot-sole away from the rock. And then they were five, the darkness making it a little difficult to truly discern one from another.

  ‘Okay,’ Sadaqat spoke from the stillness. ‘No rules down here but do as I say.’

  ‘And, look after each other, right?’ offered Blaylock. In the silence that met him he was conscious of sound reverberating off rock, a distant dulled rush of water, his own heartbeat – all the strange music of the underworld.

  Sadaqat led and they followed, sploshing into a watery passage of stooping height. As the torch beams darted about, insect-like, Blaylock saw the walls were red clay. Peering closer he made out crude markings scratched by cavers past – ‘Pickering FC’, ‘Kill Nothing But Time!’, ‘Lost! Dave’s Bollocks! Please Return!’ – as rough as the odour of damp and fetid cave air.

  ‘Why do I think some animal died here fairly recently?’ he uttered into the dark.

  ‘What you’re smelling’, Sadaqat shot over his shoulder, ‘is Nasser.’

  For all that Blaylock felt heavy-footed he could tell that Nasser, to his rear, was more so, judging by the rhythm of his steps and frequent muttered exclamations.

  They passed into a clean-washed canyon where Blaylock’s hopes for a head-height ceiling were dashed. Rather, it gradually decreased to a gap of merely a few feet from the ground. ‘Time to grovel, boys,’ grunted Sadaqat. Crawling on hands and knees, his nose grazing mud and gravel, elbows periodically immersed in water, Blaylock had to ask himself why he wasn’t slumped in an armchair at home, with tea and toast and the football on the radio.

  The next cave, however, enlarged gradually such that they could all walk erect. Up ahead Sadaqat’s long figure and ridged backpack loaned him the appearance of a winged messenger, and past his questing figure Blaylock could see two passages cleaved by a rocky obelisk, one carrying the water’s slow-flowing course. They took the other, so entering a tube-like tunnel, its walls evidently smoothed clean by centuries of erosion. Sadaqat paused at the head of a chamber and beckoned them with a hand.

  Blaylock looked up and about, his helmet’s beam vying with the others, glancing in reflected colours off the crystalline calcite spar that appeared to have petrified the cave surfaces. And he felt wonder fall upon him – felt himself, momentarily, to have entered some great and ancient catacombs – for on all sides were shelf-like rock formations, large petrifactions of humanoid proportions, suggestive of bodies laid upon bodies, conceivably not dead but merely dormant. Looking up Blaylock saw that the ceiling had assumed, to his eye, more fantastical, grotesque shapes – clusters of swollen bulbous stalactites that appeared, amid the subterranean dankness, like markers of a creature’s lair.

  ‘Amazing,’ he muttered. No response issued from the silence, until Sadaqat called out, ‘We’ve got a squeeze coming up.’
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br />   They came to a narrow, slimy gap between rocks, the exertion of passage through it causing Blaylock to feel for a fleeting instance that he was somehow birthing himself. The passage they entered was teardrop-shaped, a stream running down its middle in a trough, its walls, floor and ceiling all decorated by water action. There, looking up and about, he was newly stunned – for the walls had been scalloped, their surfaces ridged and fibrous, folds upon folds glistening and pearly-pink in the flicker of the helmet lamps.

  Bracing himself with his fingers splayed against mucid rock, Blaylock had the strongest urge to throw back his head and laugh from his gut at the sheer flesh-like, feminised beauty of what he was seeing – so removed from the necrotic chamber through which they had just come. He would have liked even more to share the laugh with his companions, and the towering inappropriateness of that notion on near enough every level struck him as a laugh all of its own.

  Then he heard Sadaqat from behind him. ‘Headlamps off.’

  The others obeyed. Blaylock, perplexed, nonetheless did likewise. The darkness was complete. The silence settled.

  Inside his neoprene shell Blaylock began to feel simultaneously clammy and chilly. Then he could hear feet shuffling around him, and had the strangest sense that he was being encircled. Unease reared up in him with a prickling rapidity.

  ‘Listen …’ he heard Sadaqat say.

  Then Nasser laughed – his sickly, uneasy laugh. ‘Nah, this is just weird, man. I mean, crazy.’ The laugh strangulated into a cough. ‘Fuck sake, can’t be doing this.’

  ‘Nasser, be quiet.’ It was Sadaqat, sharp. ‘Man up, yeah? No one lose their head. I am in charge, you listen.’

  Blaylock, wanting to speak, found his lips had gone dry.

  Nasser, though, could not stop. ‘Naw, can’t take it, you fucking hear me? I cannot take it, I’m not fucking kidding around!’

  Blaylock reached and turned on his helmet lamp, suddenly seeing Nasser’s panicked features under white light. The other dimmer faces appeared motionless. He stepped forward and took Nasser by the shoulders.

  ‘You’re fine, Nasser, okay? There’s nothing to fear. Tell me you’re fine.’

  ‘I’m not—’ he stammered, still dazed.

  ‘It’s just your mind. Alright? Trust the ground under your feet. We’re all here with you, there’s nothing to fear. Just breathe, let it go through you, the panic – it’s nothing.’

  Nasser’s eyes met his at last, somehow guiltily, but attentive. Blaylock swung round, his light swiping round the group.

  ‘Let’s move, right? Right? Sadaqat? Get the lights on.’

  The moment seemed to stretch until he heard a low exhalation and, once more, multiple light beams riddled the black murk.

  *

  A quarter of an hour later, after one final slosh through a freezing cold sump, they scrabbled up over rocks and back into the daylight, where Blaylock was struck to see Andy Grieve looking so plainly relieved. The group retraced their path back to the vehicles, Blaylock deciding to walk with Nasser, who still wore the demeanour of a mistreated hound. Remembering Sadaqat’s introduction he asked after the young man’s ambitions in medicine. Nasser spoke fretfully of his need to attain a biology A-level, since chemistry was all he really knew.

  By the van, while the others peeled off their neoprene skins, Blaylock approached Sadaqat. ‘Listen, the lights-out routine back there, what was that about?’

  Sadaqat stood up tall yet looked abashed. ‘I want to apologise. It was … the wrong move. See, my thing is, in the cave I like to find a way to take a moment? Just to be quiet, in the dark, and just listen to the cave, and the ambience, and your heart in your chest … that silence, yeah?’ He shrugged. ‘Nasser, I think maybe he just thought he could hear things crawling about.’

  Part of Blaylock wanted to be on his way, but another part, dissatisfied, wished to round off the day’s activity with some gesture of companionability. And so in fading light the Jaguar tailed the minibus to the site of an outdoor centre, a converted barn with outdoor burners where the group were booked among others to camp overnight.

  Blaylock accepted a glass mug of hot sweet tea, a samosa of spiced vegetables and an invitation to sit with the group round a burner. Lowering himself with a wince, he was glad of the heat on his face and the relief for his swollen knees and aching back, more conscious than ever of the senior figure he cut in this company.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve had such a workout since the army.’

  ‘How come you joined the army? Back in the day?’ It was Mo who spoke. Blaylock realised he had rather hoped for such a show of interest.

  ‘I had some idea about serving my country. Not that I achieved it as a soldier … But, you know, that idea has carried on to other areas.’

  ‘You weren’t, like, into the idea of being a soldier? ’Cos of the excitement and that?’

  ‘Oh … there was maybe a bit of thrill-seeking to it. It was a different time – I never saw real war, thank god. Not like Afghanistan or Iraq. Not so many war stories … But, we all lived. So I should be thankful.’

  ‘You were in Bosnia,’ Sadaqat stated, with an assertive calm.

  ‘That’s right. Part of the UN peacekeepers. No, what I was going to say – the reason you join up, the appeal of it, the principle of it – is that your character gets forged. And you do get tested, there’s no escape. But the worth of it? Arguably you have to decide for yourself. If you’re going to die – or worse – then what is it for? It’s certainly easier if you’re sure you’re on the right side. And where I was, we were facing some pretty bad sorts.’

  ‘Bosnia, that was a bad scene for them Bosnian Muslims, yeah?’ Mo picked up the baton. ‘They was getting it real bad?’

  ‘Yep,’ Blaylock sighed, setting his tea down on the grass. ‘The regular Bosnian army, it wasn’t much cop. They really needed help. But we had limits on what we could do. What changed the game, really, was mujahedin coming in, proper fighters, proper gear, fiercer, more committed. I mean … you saw them and you weren’t in any doubt they were ready to fight and kill and maybe die. It had an effect, you could tell. Even the regular Bosnian guys at checkpoints, they stopped hitting on their hipflasks and started saying their prayers.’

  ‘You had respect for mujahedin?’

  Blaylock studied his shoe and pondered Mo’s question. He was holding a circle and being listened to respectfully, like the wise elder. It seemed a useful position – flattering, to a degree, and possibly one Sadaqat had bargained for. Still, he was obliged to be honest.

  ‘Some of those fighters were – problematic,’ he said finally. ‘I had a bad time at a checkpoint once … Some bad things happened, not always black and white … But, I saw stuff that troubled me.’

  ‘Stuff like what?’

  ‘There was a thing … Some aid workers from Norway setting up a refugee camp east of us, they sent a message that they were worried about a mujahedin training camp there. Asked for our assistance. I took some of my platoon out to this field and we arrived in the middle of … quite a scene. Fifty-odd fighters all clamouring round in a semi-circle, and we shoved our way through into the midst of it and found this guy there, on his knees with his wrists bound and his head down, next to a fresh-dug hole in the ground. They had knives, the mujahedin – they always had knives. And there was a guy with a Koran and I had the weirdest sense he’d been praying for the condemned. The prisoner, we got him off his knees – he was Croat but he wasn’t a soldier, he was a schoolteacher. So we saved his life, I suppose. We could do that much – summary execution, that wasn’t on. But it was something the mujahedin brought to the party. And it disturbed me. They’d been invited, sure, they were drawn to the fight, they made a difference. But they couldn’t be commanded, as far as I could see. You couldn’t put the genie back in the lamp.’

  Blaylock had been staring aside. He heard a low, grave yet indistinct mutter and looked up to see Javed, unhappy.

  ‘Sorry, say again, Javed?’<
br />
  ‘I said what’s with the Ali Baba bullshit?’ He shook his head. ‘Genies and lamps. These were flesh-and-blood men. Come to help their suffering brothers, right?’

  ‘I don’t mean anything by it. My point is – the violence I saw in them, it was – notable. And I don’t think that helped Bosnian Muslims.’

  ‘Why you feel so strongly about Bosnian Muslims?’

  Javed was sounding yet surlier. Blaylock, perplexed, gestured with open hands. ‘Because of … the injustice. What they were subjected to.’

  ‘Injustice is everywhere, man. It wasn’t because they was white Muslims? That didn’t mean more to you? Their lives and not—?’

  ‘Javed, leave it.’ Sadaqat’s voice cut through. ‘You’re out of order, man.’

  After some moments, Javed’s eyes flicked back up to meet Blaylock’s. ‘I apologise. I shouldn’t put words in your mouth, thoughts in your head and that. What do I know? I’m sorry.’

  ‘We should speak freely,’ Blaylock replied. ‘That way we know what we’re thinking.’ He smiled as broadly as he could, drained his tea and got up, less steadily than he had hoped.

  *

  On the darkened journey back to Maryburn Blaylock was dejected, counting up what the day had cost him in physical capital – he felt it in his bones. Once back at home, melancholy settled on him like some fine, constricting web. Yet again he was alone with his work, the numbing constant in his life – indeed life seemed little but. In front of him lay a huge week: his identity cards plan in the balance, the Free Briton Brigade to be confronted. He could not say what it would amount to, but for sure the work dwarfed the cramped canvas of his ‘private life’, where privacy had resumed a look of barrenness and disuse.

  He had done a decent job of expelling Abigail Hassall from his headspace but now, in the physical space that had briefly been their weekend retreat, he could not shut out the haunt of sexual loneliness. As he sat, absently, he set about worsening things for himself, imagining what Jennie and his children were doing with their Saturday evening, since there was no surer self-flagellation.